9/11 as Shock Event: The Path to Illiberal Politics
Where were you on 9/11, when two planes exploded into the World Trade Center and a third breached the Pentagon?
I was in New York City, heading downtown from the Upper West Side on the subway to teach. It was a perfect sunny fall morning. The mood in the subway car was chill. When we stopped suddenly, and the car went dark, it seemed like a routine event. Then someone across from me told us there had been an accident: a plane had hit a skyscraper.
The sirens and the smoke were overwhelming when we finally emerged onto Canal Street, less than two miles from the World Trade Center. Some shopkeepers had turned their televisions outward, or put them on the sidewalk. I crowded in to see the images, and learned that minutes later there had been a second attack.
I called my husband, who thankfully was way uptown, and tried to call my babysitter, who was in our apartment caring for our 3-month-old daughter, but cell service had been cut off. "I've got to get home to my baby," was my mantra as I walked the six miles back through a city of dazed and terrified souls.
I will never forget the stillness of the Upper West Side as I approached my apartment building that morning. It was as though nothing had happened. It was impossible to reconcile the calm with the chaos downtown. I ran in to hug my baby, and my frantic babysitter ran out to pick up her own child.
Later, survivors of the attack arrived uptown, their clothes and hair covered in ashes, their eyes deadened. Later, first responders came home to their families, their bodies having absorbed the toxins that would eventually kill many of them. Later, we heard the stories of people who jumped from the World Trade Center towers, people who refused to leave until colleagues had been rescued, and people whose lives were saved because they stopped for coffee.
We heard far less about the attack on the Pentagon, one of the world's largest office buildings. The secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had their offices there, along with 23,000 other service members and civilians. National security considerations accounted for some of the silence. The direct hit on the nerve center of the world's most powerful military was almost too threatening to be fully acknowledged - other than by a war of retribution.
9/11 was a classic "shock event," or a grave incident that prompts a state of emergency. Authoritarian leaders know how to manipulate national calamities to consolidate their power, as Adolf Hitler did after the Reichstag fire and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan did after the 2016 coup attempt. 9/11 showed the world that even in a democracy, government officials can use a crisis to do what they've longed to do anyway -- in this case, expand the military-industrial complex, create a security state, and boost energy resources by capturing Iraqi oil.
The Muslim faith of the terrorists spawned a wave of Islamophobia in America. A surge in hate crimes (from 28 to 481 incidents that year) made many Muslims afraid to leave their homes. Any Muslim could be a terrorist, the government seemed to say as it detained hundreds, often for immigration law violations. Some people were held for many months, locked down 23 hours a day.
The post-9/11 "war on terror" deployed strategies of repression and subversion that the U.S. used during the Cold War to prop up authoritarian states that persecuted leftists. Now Muslims were on the receiving end. The Guantánamo Bay prison camp, a "space of exception" --a place outside the jurisdiction of international and U.S. laws, where torture could be freely practiced -- was an example.
Traveling as a Muslim, or as someone with a Middle Eastern name, became a challenge. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 consolidated border and transportation security agencies. New protocols kept people vigilant against the enemy. A DHS color-coded "threat advisory system," updated daily for release by the media, maintained the necessary state of anxiety among the public to justify state actions.
As mobilization for war began, the net of people the state became suspicious of widened. My own last name triggered the system. Ben was too close to Bin, as in Bin Laden, and Bin Giats, Ghiats, and Benghiats, who are both Muslims and Jews, come from or live in Algeria, Turkey, Israel and Yemen, the last my grandfather's place of origin.
For several years I was regularly subjected to Secondary Security Screening Selections (enhanced pat-downs, extra interrogations and luggage screening). "I've got a special security selection here," one TSA agent yelled, waving my boarding pass with the dreaded "SSSS" on it, causing everyone in line to look at me with hostility. Some of this treatment returned during the Trump administration: extra questioning about my origins, a hard stare.
It is fitting that the Trump administration announced itself with the January 2017 ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries. "Get used to it," tweeted the new president's then-advisor, Kellyanne Conway. "Shock to the system."
In some ways, we were already used to it. By 2017, the anti-democratic policies and actions that followed 9/11 had become normalized. Zones within the federal government, like DHS, rewarded authoritarian attitudes and policies. Ordinary Americans of Muslim faith continued to suffer harassment and injustices, while elites who may have aided the 9/11 terrorists (the Saudis) or made billions from the Iraq War (defense contractors) continued to benefit from deals with the American government.
That shadowy world where white-collar criminals, gangsters, murderous autocrats, and traffickers connect is Trump’s native habitat, and he knew how to bring all of these illiberal trends to fruition, placing them within an openly authoritarian agenda. We can reflect on how the plunder and lawlessness that marked much of the government’s response to 9/11 prepared the conditions for our current democratic crisis, and how it contrasts with the courage and selflessness shown by so many Americans on that day.
I often wonder if that shadowy, illiberal world of murderous autocrats, traffickers, white collar criminals, defense contractors has become more powerful than the once dominate liberal order of western democratic countries? It seems the dark forces of corruption and autocracy are ascendant in this moment in world history?
I am sorry for the pain so many continue to feel over 9-11. But for me today, melancholy arises from reflecting not on the shadow the past casts on the present, but on the shadow the present casts on the future. I am reflecting on what 8-22-2021 portends for 2024. Bret Stephens, in the NYT of September 7, pairs 9-11 with 8-22: we are “commemorating the first great jihadist victory over America” only days after “the second great jihadist victory over America.”
Americans made heroic efforts to elect Biden in 2020 in order to preserve democracy in America. But it is necessary to recall that Biden, in his actions as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was instrumental in deceiving the American people into embracing the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He helped us exact revenge for a 9-11 against a third party that had nothing to do with it, but were instead guilty of being ethnically Middle Eastern. He was thus instrumental in creating the legacy of 9-11: the identification of the new enemy needed by the US military-industrial complex (Moslems, Arabs, and “terrorists,” meaning in practice anyone that somebody in the government chooses to call a “terrorist”); the end of habeas corpus; the legal determination that the President of the United States has the arbitrary power of life and death over every human being on the planet; the murder of civilians and citizens of countries around the world with which the US is not at war, based on serial guesses relayed to drone operators in Virginia in a game of “telephone,” and based on free-fire zones in which every murder victim is by definition a terrorist; extraordinary rendition; the normalization of torture; the normalization of federal officials lying to Congress; limitless secret powers both in surveillance and operations for our internal and external spy agencies; legally spying on and recording every moment in the life of every American; the enlarged expenditure of trillions of dollars to create the means of killing people and destroying their material civilization, while enriching Daddy Warbucks and impoverishing other Americans ; and on and on. That is to say, Donald Trump‘s wish list, bequeathed to him and perhaps Tucker Carlson or Josh Hawley, by Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden.
The Biden-engineered debacle of 8-22, and his appalling defense of his incompetence and his willful ignorance of the realities in Afghanistan, has awakened the whole world from the dream that with Biden we were in reliable, safe hands, owing to competence derived from experience, temperament, and statesman-like judgment. His reliability was an illusion manufactured by the Democratic Party establishment, with the help of the corporate media, in its desperation to keep Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic presidential nomination. His involvement in the catastrophes of 9-11 and 8-22 is emblematic of the fact that America inflicted both these catastrophes on itself. America largely created jihadis in Afghanistan because, as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said in the 1970s, we wanted to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Unions’ Vietnam (i.e., by turning it into a hell on earth, which we did extremely well). We went to war in Afghanistan under Bush for absolutely no reason except that it is in the nature of militaristic societies to wage war.
8-22 demonstrates that we were dreaming when we thought Biden was going to save American democracy. He pleasantly surprised us by telling us he was going to be the new FDR. He proposed huge new programs to benefit the American people instead of the oligarchy. He was going to raise the minimum-wage to $15 an hour. The criminals of 2016 to 2020 would be prosecuted and democratic norms and accountability would be restored to government. He was going to address the destruction of the global environment with programs adequate to the problem. He was going to protect voting rights. Thus he earned accolades from AOC and Bernie Sanders. But his programs, even if they were large enough, which they are not, are by design temporary palliatives, not Rooseveltian structural changes. As establishment Democrats always do, he has abandoned his progressive promises while blaming the Republicans for doing so. He is silently letting the $15 an hour minimum wage, the public option, and protecting voting rights slide into oblivion. Ending the filibuster and unpacking the obscenely perverted Supreme Court were never in the picture. The malefactors of 2016 to 2020 are free and gleefully planning their triumphal return in 2024.
In reality, Biden promised the fat cats before he was elected that nothing would fundamentally change. His history is that he was instrumental in helping Clinton pass the reactionary legislation that Reagan could not: de-regulating the financial sector (which enabled the crash of 2008, and vastly increased the banksters’ wealth and control over America); destroying the welfare system for the poor; creating the current version of the auction-block-to-cellblock pipeline for 1/4 of the worlds prison population (while creating dozens of new capital offenses for a good measure); militarizing the police; and as “Senator Credit Card” from Delaware, getting the bankruptcy bill passed (under Bush), which enabled credit card companies to squeeze every last penny out of America ‘s poor, whom the Establishment itself had turned into debtors by impoverishing them (legislation that enraged Elizabeth Warren so much that she decided to to enter politics). Margaret Thatcher said Tony Blair was her greatest creation; Clinton was Reagan’s greatest creation, and Biden is his clone. He is what he has always appeared to be: a not-very-smart, glad-handing, cynical, right-wing servant of the oligarchy.
Can anyone explain how Biden, who is now looking like a failed president (as in the title of Bret Stephens column) is going to keep the Republicans from winning the house in 2022 and stealing the presidency in 2024? When are we going to stop looking to (white male) political saviors? We now live under an “inverted fascism“: instead of a tyrannical political sphere controlling the economic sphere, as in the first half of the 20th century, a tyrannical economic sphere now controls the political sphere. This mode of “democracy” is the product of the “corporate coup In slow motion” that has been carried out with great skill and determination by a wide array of powerful and extremely wealthy reactionary forces since the 1970s, beginning in reaction against what they viewed as the “excess of democracy” of the 1960s.
Our government, the best government money can buy, will not save us. Tyranny requires perverting and degrading every aspect of social and individual life. The American and now global oligarchy has accomplished this perversion and degradation with consummate skill from the 1970s to now, and is on the verge of anointing itself as our deity in the person of a truly imperial ( which is to say, fascist) president. As in the 1930s, only mass organization, particularly by students and workers, with mass demonstrations and mass civil disobedience, can save us. But even if half the American people were not asleep and the other half were not out of their minds, this would take years and decades of mass education and preparation, (to say nothing of brutal government repression—see Standing Rock under our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president). These things cannot be done in time for 2022 and 2024.
Since Biden‘s inauguration I had mostly succeeded in avoiding spending endless hours doom-scrolling; 8-22 started me up again. Since 2016 I have been trying to understand the nightmare that has arrived in America (as I presume everyone who reads Lucid has). On 8-22 I realized that I have unconsciously begun resigning myself to the termination of American democracy in 2024. I am now thinking that instead of continuing to try to understand proto-fascism, I should begin trying to understand what happens after a fascist take-over. Perhaps Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar, and Argentina under Pinochet would be good places to start. Despair is unthinkable (though my mood does indeed feel like despair). One must never give up; one must always refuse tyranny. But it appears that the terms of the engagement will soon change.
I apologize for the length of this comment. My heart is very heavy. When my mother got older, she would say from time to time, “I think I’ve lived too long.” I didn’t understand what she meant then. Now I do.